I taught college – on English faculties – for over thirty years, beginning as a fellow in the English Department during my graduate student phase at UCLA in the 1980s and retiring in May of 2020 after a twenty-year tour of duty at SUNY Oswego in Upstate New York. I was never a liberal and so was perpetually an anomalous presence in academia. I have described the fate of a non-conformist among left-wingers in a two-part article at The Orthosphere: Leaving the Blight of Higher Education Part I — Farewell Students and Leaving the Blight of Higher Education Part II — Farewell Faculty. I could live with the ultra-liberal university, but not with the ferociously “woke” university, which sucks the essence out of anything resembling higher education, especially in the humanities. The Wikipedia describes me as “an American intellectual.” It is a generally accurate designation – in that I have always tried to exercise my intellect. In the contemporary world, however, exercising one’s intellect, rather than conforming to slogans, leads to conclusions that are diametrically opposite to those that now prevail in every American institution.
In particular, I see the ethics of the New Testament as founded in the clearest insight into human nature that has ever occurred to humanity. Reading the work of the late René Girard in graduate school – and later on, meeting Girard – led me to this position. Girard regards human beings as “hard-wired” to engage in scapegoating and he sees Christianity as the revelation of this propensity and as a moral injunction against scapegoating. Everything connected with the Left and its “wokeness” springs from resentment and the human (all-too-human) propensity to scapegoat. The riotous summer of 2020 illustrates Girard’s perspicacious observations. I have written, from a Girardian point of view, about the “mostly peaceful protests” in the essay Living out the Bacchae (America Burns), also at The Orthosphere, a Catholic-Reactionary website.
The political and cultural analyses of Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Stephen Green impress me for being so thoroughly grounded in a deep intuition about human nature. Like Mr. Whittle, I am a lifelong fan of science fiction – about which I have published a good deal. I am co-author with Kim Paffenroth of the 2006 book The Truth Is Out There – Christian Themes in Classic TV Science Fiction.
7 replies on “Leaving the blight of higher education”
Thank you so much for your contribution. Honored to have your voice of experience. We need to “reimagine” our higher education construct, and as an alum, I propose that with trepidation and hope that we can preserve the reputation of my alma mater currently knee deep in the wokeness.
Cheers to you and yours from a fellow Catholic. God bless.
“We need to ‘reimagine’ our higher education construct.”
Dear Jeremy — You couldn’t have used more appropriate words. The genuine goal of higher education is to open the late-adolescent mind to transcendence. This requires cultivating imagination and intuition. College students should be exposed to the literary canon, from the Greeks and Romans through medieval literature right up to Dostoevsky and Henry James. They should also be exposed to Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven – and to the superlative items in the canon of Western art.
One trouble with higher education is that it is incompatible with bureaucracy, but our colleges and universities are nowadays one hundred per cent bureaucratic. Genuine higher education should be as non-institutional possible and as spontaneous as possible. What we have is sloganeering.
Thank you for your comment.
Gad Saad describes the situation in a very colorful way in his recent book The Parasitic Mind
Two or three of my friends have recommended The Parasitic Mind. Your recommendation has spurred me to put it my list to read. “Parasitism” describes the Left accurately: The Left takes over institutions bequeathed to the present centuries of labor and then destroys them from the inside out. I watched this take place over three decades in academia, but the rapidity of the final phase shocked me. An ethos of denunciation replaced the university’s traditional mission of opening late-adolescent minds to beauty and transcendence. With one or two small exceptions every college and university in the USA is now a training barracks for a totalitarian elite. I have the suspicion that the combination of malice and stupidity that calls itself “woke” is historically unprecedented.
Thank you for posting here. Please allow me to offer my sincere appreciation for the service you provided during your career, and how disappointed I am that a man of your calibre and intellect has been driven from higher learning, where what you have to offer is in so much need, if not demand.
I hope, and have not much doubt, that you will find other and better venues through which to continue your love of teaching. Here, for example.
Thank you, Lynda, for your kind words. Given what colleges and universities have become, I am glad to be quit of them. In the small city of Oswego — and old harbor-town on the south-eastern shore of Lake Ontario — I enjoy a large society of friends. We recommend books to one another and talk about when we get together, which is regularly, even during the pandemic.
I am happy to have discovered Bill Whittle and his crew.
My pleasure to welcome you among us. I think you will find this a stimulating environment, with lots of excellent content provided by Bill, Scott and Steve, and not a little of which by our erudite members.
I’m sure I speak for our fellow members when I say we are more than happy to have you add to the conversation.